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ANNUAL SERMON 



BEFORE THE 



American Board of Commissioners 
for Foreign Missions 



DELIVERED AT 



PROVIDENCE, R. L, OCTOBER 3, 1899 



REV. GEORGE C. aDAMS, D.D 

Pastor of the First Congregational Church 
SAN FRANCISCO, CAL. 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT 

ANNUAL SERMON 

BEFORE THE 

American Board of Commissioners 
for Foreign Missions 



DELIVERED AT 



PROVIDENCE, R. L, OCTOBER 3, 1899 



BY THE 



REV. GEORGE C; ADAMS, D.D. 

Pastor of the First Congregational Church 
SAN FRANCISCO, CAL. 



PUBLISHED BY THE BOARD 

CONGREGATIONAL HOUSE, BOSTON 
1899 






-t*v 



53997 



Beacon Press : 

Thomas Todd, Printer, 

14 Beacon Street, 

Boston. 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 



" I CAME THAT THEY MAY HAYE LIFE, AND MAY HAVE IT ABUN- 
DANTLY." — John X : IO. 

The Holy Spirit works through human means. He 
comes, not at our agonized call alone, but when we have 
fulfilled the conditions in which it is possible for Him to 
reach us. Elijah was never more in earnest in prayer in his 
life than when he asked for translation because he was not 
fit to live. But even the Spirit of God could do nothing 
with him in that mood ; it was only when the wind and the 
earthquake and the fire had passed over him, and his rest- 
less spirit was humbled by the mighty unrest of nature, that 
he was fit to hear the "still small voice." The Spirit of 
God had a special commission to give him, but was power- 
less until the prophet had risen from his hopeless pessimism, 
and in the awful stillnessrthat follows the tornado his voice 
could be heard. The outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost 
was not a sudden nor an unexpected occurrence to the disci- 
ples. Not a word of surprise is expressed by them. The 
astonished were the unprepared ; the disciples had received 
a training in the fifty days preceding that made them ready ; 
they met for prayer, and with one accord continued stead- 
fastly in prayer. They at last understood the Saviour's pre- 
diction about the coming of the Comforter, and their lives 
were dedicated to his service. It was not until the day of 
Pentecost was fully come that He appeared; and the "fully" 
here spoken of refers as much to the preparation of heart as to 
the date on the calendar. As the development of the young 
church went on, He still came only to those whose hearts 
were ready, and whose lives were fulfilling the conditions 
under which He could work successfully. Unpalatable as 



4 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

the idea is to many, He could not come to the twelve wait- 
ing disciples at Ephesus whom Paul found, because of the 
incompleteness of their creed. They believed in a Saviour 
yet to be revealed. There was no place in that confession 
for the coming of the Holy Spirit. When Paul preached 
the gospel to them and they met the conditions, the Spirit 
came to them, and the usual manifestations of his presence 
followed. There is no variation from this law ; there is a 
divine order in revelation to the individual soul, as much as 
in creation or revelation through Scripture, and no amount 
of prayer without preparation will cause it to vary. 

The Saviour recognized this fact, and emphasized it. 
The disciples could not understand how it was expedient 
that He should go away from them, but He insisted on it. 
They clung to the earthly Jesus ; He led them to the divine 
Christ. They were as lost without his bodily presence as a 
child without its mother, but he prepared them as a mother 
is compelled to for the time when they must walk without 
Him, relying on themselves ; for that purpose they were to 
be better guided by the Spirit than they could be by the 
Master himself. So we may understand the evidences of 
the resurrection and the occurrences of the forty days. The 
appearances of the risen Christ are mysterious even now 
until we have the key. Two purposes were before him ; 
first, to give sufficient evidence of the fact of the resurrec- 
tion for all future use the Spirit would have to make of it ; 
and second, to so train the wondering disciples that they 
would be ready to walk without His presence. That the 
first was thoroughly accomplished is shown by the fact that 
Paul, who was not born into the kingdom until long after 
these occurrences, is the one to gather into one statement 
the evidences of the resurrection, and show their cumulative 
force. In our discussions we are prone to give too little 
weight to the second purpose ; a careful study of the appear- 
ance of Christ after His resurrection, with this question in 
mind, " What was He trying to accomplish ? " reveals a pro- 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. $ 

influence on the minds of the disciples, that pre- 
pared them for the wonderful change that came with the 
outpouring- of the Spirit. He was leading them from the 
visible to the invisible. His words to Mary Magdalene, 
the walk to Emmaus, and the revealing through the break- 
ing of bread ; his two appearances to the disciples when the 
same body that bore the print of the nails and the wound of 
the spear had suddenly appeared in their midst, though the 
doors were shut for fear of the Jews ; the days so spent 
among them that even the untutored fishermen realized that 
they were on the borderland between two worlds ; all these 
things were a part of the education of the believers into the 
thought of a spiritual Christ, unseen, but more real to them 
than ever, who should be truly present to them, and whose 
work should go on more grandly than ever under the con- 
stant impulse of the Holy Ghost. How well this purpose 
was accomplished ! The same disciples who fled at the 
arrest, crept fearfully at a distance at the crucifixion, could 
not believe the resurrection was a fact, and were affrighted 
at sight of Him, supposing it was a spirit, while they could 
hardly withdraw their eyes from the heavens into which He 
had disappeared, yet went submissively into Jerusalem, their 
lesson learned, and tarried there as the Master had com- 
manded, meeting constantly for prayer and conference, 
until Pentecost was fully come. 

In such manner Jesus fulfilled his own words : " I came 
that they may have life, and may have it abundantly." The 
religion of form must give way to that of the heart. The 
letter that killeth must break down before the Spirit that 
giveth life. The loved form of the Master must be so com- 
pletely forgotten that Paul should be able to say, "Even 
though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we 
know Him so no more." The men and women who had been 
affrighted at every new manifestation of the power and glory 
of Christ, and had fled for their lives, were to become as 
bold as lions. The same Peter who had sworn that he had 



6 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

never seen Jesus, was to stand in the most august presence 
in Judea and accuse the Sanhedrim of murder in the first 
degree, and men were to explain the transition by taking 
knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus. So the 
expressed purpose of his coming was fulfilled upon the little 
band who gathered about Him in His earthly pilgrimage, and 
in like manner it was and is to be fulfilled through all time. 
Without His coming there would be no significance in the 
coming of the Holy Ghost, for He was to use the work that 
the Saviour had done, and without that work there was no 
means of action whatever for the Spirit. So on the human 
side, there is no opportunity for the Spirit until He can 
bring home to the soul this fact that Jesus came. Here is 
at once the inspiration and the method of all successful 
missions — the fact that Jesus came, the purpose for which 
He came, the abundance of that purpose. The Holy Spirit 
is to use these facts to inspire a like willingness for sacrifice 
in those to whom Christ has come. He is to carry these 
thoughts as basal facts to men who are lost in sin, and who 
can never rise above their inheritance until the Holy Spirit 
brings through human lips the same old story that has 
made this earth increasingly beautiful through nineteen 
centuries. 

I. "/ came" A simple enough statement of fact, but 
pregnant with mighty truth. Here is a startling use of 
tense: " the thief cometh," "I came." The thief is always 
coming ; the struggle is always on ; but the Saviour came 
once. The thief comes this night, and tomorrow, and every 
night; but that one coming of Christ long ago has set in 
motion agencies that will be powerful under the impulse of 
the Spirit, and will make it possible to conquer. the thief. 
The purpose is not that He shall come whenever the thief 
appears, but that He shall furnish the Holy Spirit the means 
whereby He may strengthen every man for his own great 
battle, and enable him to win the victory. 

Why repeat this truth now ? Is not the historical fact 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 7 

that Jesus came admitted well-nigh universally among intel- 
ligent people ? There was never a time when so large a part 
of humanity believed that Jesus came as just now ; that 
name was never upon so many tongues, and never com- 
manded so great respect. Infidelity has never had so weak 
a hold on the reading public. Ten years ago the writings of 
agnosticism were thrust before you at every turn ; the train 
boy handed you that class of literature at the start ; if that 
was not wanted he had something else in reserve, light 
literature, possibly some religious book, but not religious 
enough to offend any one. Now it is quite probable that the 
first book laid on the lap in any train will be "In His Steps." 
A news agent testified not long ago that it was his best 
selling book. Let them criticise it if they must ; it is being 
read, and is having a mighty influence to turn the thought of 
humanity to the fact that Jesus came ; no one can read it 
carefully without being impressed with the fact that His 
coming was of more than ordinary importance, since it has 
led to a story of such consecration at this distance in time. 
What a large proportion of the literature of the present is 
founded upon that coming ! A few years ago we were 
mourning because the taste of the young turned so generally 
to a trashy kind of writings. It is fashionable now to read 
the books that are founded on the fact that Jesus came ; 
turn whichever way we will, there is cheering evidence of the 
truth that every knee shall bow and every tongue shall 
confess. We are in the midst of a great tide that is sweeping 
all human thought before it. Shall we not be content, and 
remember that the Spirit who has made such successful use 
of the coming thus far will carry it on to its great consum- 
mation ? 

But the historical fact is the smallest part of it. A large 
proportion of those who admit that Jesus came, see no great 
significance in it unless it touches their self-interest. The 
name of Jesus has never been on the lips of laboring men so 
generally as now ; gatherings of workingmen have actually 



o OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

cheered when that name was mentioned, and many of them 
have gone home to find out about Him more than they knew 
before. This is well, but it has been largely because He was 
a carpenter, and they are carpenters. Not Jesus as a Sav- 
iour, but Jesus as a carpenter, to help them to higher wages 
and an easier life. Now how much soever we may desire that 
every man may get the highest wages he can earn, and every 
true Christian has that desire, it was not the prime object of 
the advent of Jesus. When one came to Him to plead for 
some change in his social condition he received the caution 
to take heed and beware of covetousness. Strong words 
were spoken against the sin of acquiring for the sake of 
having, or of spending for selfish pleasure, words that apply 
to every class in the community. More than that, when 
Jesus touched a man he left his trade and lived by faith. 
Ours is an age of unrest and ambition, much of it worthy, 
and we believe we are on the eve of great changes, where 
more even justice can be done to all, but that does not 
warrant us in using the name of Jesus to conjure with. All 
this ambition, and the great uprising of humanity in every 
way, are due to the fact that Jesus could say " I came." But 
they are incidental. The truth of His coming cannot be 
successfully proclaimed in any place without an appreciable 
rising in the scale of being ; but there is no promise that the 
Spirit will use His coming first of all to promote selfishness. 
Not to possess more, but to use more for blessing others, is 
the fruit of the Spirit. Jesus came that we may learn to 
forget self, and love our neighbor as ourselves. 

While a great multitude are learning to have a sort of 
love for the name of Jesus, not many are finding what is the 
real heart of Christ. Though it is true that we have more 
books and better teaching now on the inner life of Christ, it 
is also true that a great multitude are satisfied with the 
historical fact that Jesus came. The friendship of some is 
one of the hardest tests of the divine force in the world. 
Just now there is a tendency among thoughtful Jews to admit 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 9 

the excellent character and blameless life of Jesus. One 
public address at least, by a Jewish business man, tells how- 
he was taught that all the sufferings of the Jews were due to 
the teachings of Jesus ; how he was led to read and think for 
himself, with the result that he found that Jesus was a Jew, 
faithful to His people, who spiritualized the Old Testament 
teachings ; then he thinks that Paul, without the aid or sym- 
pathy of Jesus, spread his teachings among the Gentiles. 
He expresses the greatest admiration for Jesus of Nazareth ; 
and leading rabbis state that this man's view is that of many 
intelligent and thoughtful Jews. The chief rabbi of Eng- 
land lately expressed sentiments that might easily have been 
suggested by Him whom we Christians adore. We are glad 
for so much ; it marks a tendency in the right direction, but 
as yet only a tendency ; and with the intimate relations of 
Jew and Gentile it is a dangerous tendency to some. When 
intelligent Jews see that the wonderful prophecy, that "the 
tribe shall not depart from Judah nor a lawgiver from be- 
tween his feet till Shiloh come," was wonderfully fulfilled in 
the preservation of the integrity of the tribe of Judah, and 
the continuance of the Sanhedrim till Jesus came, and that 
then they were lost forever ; when they see that the power 
of Jesus was not that He was a Jew, but that the Divine 
Spirit dwelt in Him, and that He was Immanuel, then the 
reign of the Spirit shall begin for them. In the meantime 
many need to study as never before the heart of Christ, and 
make way for the Spirit in their own hearts, lest they be 
drawn away by the very plausibility of the recognition of 
the truth that Jesus came. There are subtle forces at 
work; the multitude are compelled to accept Jesus' state- 
ment, "I came," but are industriously trying to admit only 
so much as they have to. Even the spirits are called in to 
help ; many people who like to be called intelligent are visit- 
ing spiritualist mediums, and with wonderful unanimity their 
communications state that Jesus was the highest created 
being, or that He was the greatest man that ever lived. 



IO OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

Either the auto-suggestion of the medium is very strong, or 
there are lying spirits about. 

A Voluntary Coming. However we may teach that He 
was sent, there is a quiet statement of fact in His words, 
" I came." Our own spirit of self-sacrifice will be greatly 
enhanced when we realize how thoroughly voluntary all His 
acts were. We have suffered the cross, which is the well 
chosen symbol of his coming, to overshadow all else. It 
was not the fact that He hung on the cross that gave it its 
significance ; it was that He hung there of his own free will, 
in order that others might not have to hang there. " I have 
power to lay down my life, and I have power to take it 
again." He had power to call for the legions of angels who 
were anxiously waiting for the command to rush to His 
help ; and He had, what no one else ever had, the power to 
refrain from calling for divine help in that supreme hour. 
Every step of the way He trod was of His own choice ; the 
first humble coming to earth and each stage of His journey 
through it were purely voluntary. He foretold all his suffer- 
ings and triumph as something premeditated ; three times 
he informed them that it was predetermined. This thought 
grew upon Paul until he was absorbed in it ; " have this 
mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus ; who, being in 
the form of God, counted it not a prize to be on an equality 
with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a ser- 
vant." And again, "He humbled himself, becoming obedi- 
ent unto death, yea, even the death of the cross." Here is 
the process from the time He left His throne, till the last 
great act of obedience was complete. Jesus, not only at the 
cross, but from the manger on, was an all-atoning sacrifice ; 
and He was that all-atoning sacrifice because He chose 
to be. 

There is a wonderful quality about the peace of Jesus 
which He promised to will to His disciples. Not only His 
calmness in view of disaster and death, but His evident 
looking to these experiences as a part of His own plan for 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. II 

His life, in consonance with the plan of the Father, mark 
this peace as of a different quality from any other on earth. 
He is peaceful because He is filled with the enthusiasm of 
the greatest mission ever known. He is not startled at 
arrest, or trial, or execution, because He has come to them 
all of His own free will. The consciousness of a great duty 
done, a grand privilege met, makes that peace so wonderful. 
"I came" means the coming for one definite purpose, and 
all the events of the life are a part of the carrying out of 
that purpose. " For this cause came I unto this hour " is 
the key to all His words and acts. Unless there is life in 
Him who comes there will be nothing to impart to those 
He plans to save. He must have life enough to conquer 
death, but there must be more than that. We can be brave 
in view of death when it is inevitable ; but Jesus was brave 
and calm as He planned to die. It has been recently proved 
that an agnostic can approach death with a great degree of 
calmness ; but none but a God could ever come to earth for 
the purpose of dying, and be calm. The peace of Jesus was 
not the peace of enduring, but the peace of deliberate sacri- 
fice. He went to the cross, not as many of his disciples 
did shortly after, who sought the crown of martyrdom with 
songs and shouts of joy, but with a calmness and majesty 
that compelled the hardened centurion who executed him 
to cry, " Truly this was the Son of God." The death on the 
cross was the culmination of the sacrifice, and his peace 
there was the same as it had been all along the way. Jesus 
was consistent from the beginning to the end of his remark- 
able work. The life that He came to impart is as clearly 
seen in each day's work and endurance as in the last. He 
could give life because He had life. He came to bring 
divine life to earth. 

It is customary to dwell on the miracles in order to show 
His power ; yet the miracles, great though they were, are 
only incidents of His coming. We may give them too much 
weight because they are miracles ; in performing them Jesus 



12 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

was simply himself. In discussing His power we have un- 
wittingly allowed our enemies to draw attention from the 
heart of the gospel to a symptom of it. Instead of center- 
ing our attention on the fact that He came to bring life, we 
have been discussing the possibility of miracles. Much good 
may have resulted from that discussion, and incidental proof 
of Jesus' mission may have been drawn from it, but it is high 
time for all believers to learn that the real question is not 
whether miracles were performed, but whether He who did 
these things is life in himself. John's powerful statement 
needs careful study : " In Him was life, and the life was the 
light of men." If there was life in Him there would cer- 
tainly be manifestations of the life out of the common expe- 
rience of men, and that in this case makes them miracles. 
So our study of the possibility and the fact of miracles is 
only that we may learn if there was divine life in Him who 
performed them. When that is proved they have little fur- 
ther significance for us. They are only what we would 
expect of the Son of God. They are the acts of a loved 
friend, the greatest of all friends, and as such are dear to 
us ; but they have real value only as evidence of His life. 
The quality of the miracles is their real power ; Jesus vol- 
untarily scattered such blessing by means of the great life 
He was, that wherever He went men were raised up from 
their weak, lost condition, and Jesus' life became literally 
the light of men. We say that He came voluntarily, and 
we have stated a great truth ; but when we are able to say 
that He came voluntarily to bring light into darkened and 
sin-blinded lives, we have said a thousand times more. Just 
as the fact of His coming means more as we study it, so the 
voluntary coming grows in significance as we reflect on those 
to whom He came, and what was the effect on them of His 
coming. 

The Manner of His Coming. There is no more in- 
structive place in His life than that where we at the last 
find Him praying, "And now, O Father, glorify thou me 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 13 

with thine own self with the glory that I had with thee 
before the world was." We at once ask why He has not 
now that glory, and the only answer is because He had 
voluntarily laid it aside for the sake of lost humanity. It is 
the grandest purpose ever revealed. Peter the Great might 
leave his royalty for a time in order that he might be a 
better king, but Jesus emptied himself of His glory in order 
that His subjects might become kings. He had made him- 
self poor, that we. through His poverty might become rich. 
And when we say poor, we do not mean poor as one of us 
would be ; His manger cradle, His homeless life, His bor- 
rowed tomb, are incidents of His poverty, but they are not 
that poverty itself. As the physical suffering was the least 
of the agony on the cross, so the poverty in which He lived 
those three and thirty years as regarded home and earthly 
fortune is the smallest part of the real poverty He knew. 
There was a time in Christian development when the thought 
of the earthly poverty of the Master would have great weight, 
but we are far enough advanced in spiritual life now to know 
that it is only the husk of His poverty. He could not have 
come in voluntary poverty and not been poor in this world's 
goods : but His real poverty was in what He had surren- 
dered for our sakes. And first we must learn, if possible, 
how deep the poverty of which He was capable. The one 
who has most can lose most. The poverty of one who has 
been rich is far greater than that of one who has never 
known abundance. Possibility of suffering grows with de- 
velopment. That wonderful beatitude, " Blessed are they 
that mourn," means nothing at all to the savage. Its mean- 
ing grows with the refining of the sensibilities. As the 
spiritual takes precedence, and the physical is overcome, 
that promise rises until we are able to heartily thank God 
for the ability to mourn. Carry the thought forward, and 
what was the capacity for mourning in Jesus Christ ? There 
were never such tears as those He shed over Jerusalem. 
No sentence in the English or any other language contains 



14 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

so much in so small compass as those two words, "Jesus 
wept," There was never such love as His, as He looked on 
the young man and loved him. Human thought is powerless 
to comprehend the capacity of Jesus for love, for sorrow, 
and for sacrifice. Then human thought is powerless to com- 
prehend the poverty of Christ. 

No foreign missionary among a degraded and savage 
race ever approached the condition of Jesus in this world. 
Sin was on every side of Him; wherever he turned the taint 
was in the air ; every friend he had was a sufferer from sin, 
and a sinner. We may picture to ourselves the Black Hole 
in Calcutta, where into a space some eighteen feet square 
a hundred and forty-six British soldiers were driven at the 
point of the sword ; we may think of the one little opening 
where air could come in ; of the tainted air without, full of 
the smell of burning; we may picture to ourselves the mis- 
erable wretches crowding and struggling in their agonized 
fight to get where they could breathe ; but we cannot for 
one moment by any such picturing get a conception of the 
absolute poverty and loneliness of the Son of God in this 
world of sin. If one can remember when, a pure-hearted 
lad, he first heard the conversation of those who could not 
speak without oaths and loathsome talk, if he can recall the 
shuddering and fear that took hold upon him, he may be 
able to get some slight idea of what Jesus had to endure. 
But we mortals become used to such things ; we reach a 
time when we can hear an oath and not shudder. Jesus 
never could ; His spotless character revolted at sin as much 
at the end of his life as at its beginning. The temptations 
of the forty days were only the concentrated poverty of His 
whole life. There is exquisite pathos in the statement after 
it was over that angels came and ministered unto Him ; one 
breath of pure air in the Black Hole ; one moment's respite 
in the poverty He had assumed. And this poverty grew 
deeper and deeper. He must tread the wine press alone ; 
He must know the complete absence of all the purity that 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 1 5 

belongs to heaven, until from His parched lips there is 
wrung the cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken 
me?" 

One of the principal aggravations of this poverty was 
that as a result of sin men could not understand the mission 
of Christ, nor can they yet. It grows upon us with passing 
generations, but it may safely be said that we do not yet 
grasp more than the smallest fraction of what He came to 
do. Even His divine patience was so intensely tried that 
now and then His face was turned heavenward, with excla- 
mations on the absolute lack of faith of those about Him. 
His mission was misunderstood from the start. Men were 
looking for freedom from their most galling yoke, and that 
just then was Roman bondage ; in their eagerness to escape 
from that they were ready to crucify any Saviour who did 
not make that his chief concern. The very disciples whom 
He gathered never understood Him until He was gone. 
Judas, in disgust that Jesus did not take the sword and the 
scepter, let his own cupidity have full reign, and betrayed 
his Master; Peter in abject hopelessness became a coward 
and denied Him. And even after the resurrection, when 
His presence was more sacred than ever, the great question 
that arose in their minds was, " Wilt thou at this time re- 
store the kingdom to Israel ? " After the reign of the Spirit 
had begun, and till the present moment, men have always 
been ready to make the earthly kingdom their chief thought 
in relation to Christ. From that hour when the sons of 
thunder wanted to call down fire from heaven on the city 
that would not receive Him, to the latest diatribe in the 
name of Jesus against existing social conditions, men have 
been ready at any moment to sacrifice the heart of Christ 
for a little momentary gain in worldly advantage over those 
from whom they differed. 

II. " That They May Have Life." We in our short- 
sightedness allow our sympathy to become sentimental, and 
hasten to carry to others the results of life, its conven- 



i6 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 



iences ; we long to teach others the value of a Christian 
civilization ; we would like to give them our methods, and 
the means whereby we have achieved success, but the teach- 
ing of Jesus is not like that. There is the same divine order 
in this gift as in that of inspiration. Jesus did not bring one 
result of the life He gives into this world with Him ; they 
will all develop themselves in time. It is self-developing 
power that He bestows ; all the rest will follow. No long- 
ing that others may be as we are should ever for one mo- 
ment turn our attention from the one great purpose Jesus 
states, "That they may have life." Not method, but life; 
not what life has developed in others, but life in order to 
develop for themselves. 

The World's Need. The more we study history the 
more we are impressed with its uncompleted beginnings. 
That tower of Babel, standing unfinished under the eastern 
sky, is a type of more things than the confusion of tongues. 
It has its antitype in the ruins along the Euphrates and 
Tigris, in the meager remains of the primitive races of 
Palestine, in the monuments of Egypt. History is a record 
of continual risings and falls ; race has succeeded race, 
civilization has crowded civilization, and the center of light 
and influence has ever moved on. The Hebrew gave the 
knowledge of one God, and was exiled. The Greek gave 
one language to commerce that Paul might speak of Christ 
in any city in the world, and became an ancient art gallery, 
without life, and with no power of self-continuance. Rome 
gave one government, until the teachings of Jesus had taken 
root, and then broke up into fragments that had no resem- 
blance to an empire. The history of the races of the earth 
has been a continual crescendo, ending in diminuendo. A 
nation has come to the front, acted its part for a little, lost 
its hold, and gone into desuetude, only to give opportunity 
for another to do the same. And all through this wearisome 
progress there has been an ever-increasing wail, a moaning 
for something that is not. Men have risen who have had a 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 1 7 

greater grasp of truth than others, and have swayed the 
multitude for a time, but with their death the reflex wave 
has swept away their power. Pericles, who never began any 
important matter without prayer, was able to give Greece a 
golden age ; while he lived Athens was great ; so long as his 
noble purpose and strong hand were able to make themselves 
felt Athens was a power, but when he died the forces he had 
controlled broke loose, and Athens became the home of 
babblers and sneering philosophers that Paul found. All 
history is full of the thought that there are possibilities for 
humanity which have never been realized. Many times a 
race has been like Baldasarre, the old man in Romola, who 
pored over the Greek text with tears running down his 
cheeks, and knew he had read it once, and thought he 
could almost make it out, but the paralysis of power was 
final. 

There is great unrest in this world today. In every 
civilized race a revolution seems imminent. Questions that 
will not down are making the future uncertain. That beau- 
tiful simplicity and trust in the relation of capital and labor 
that appear in the Book of Ruth have long been gone ; we 
see two great factors in the world's work arrayed against 
each other, and sometimes it looks like a death grapple. The 
leading nations of the civilized world have accepted democ- 
racy in whole or in part, and with it has come the rising of 
the degraded classes, the education of those who will accept 
it, deeper thought, the desire for self-improvement, ambitions 
that have never been able to find such general expression 
before. All the pent-up forces of humanity have been let 
loose, and Icarus is flying perilously near the sun. On the 
other hand, the races that we call uncivilized are coming in 
such close touch with the rest of the world, that they are 
really a part of us. The theater of the world's action has 
shifted, and the far-away islands to which we used to send 
missionaries, with the thought that we would probably never 
see them again, are now at our doors. We have been pulling: 



l8 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

out' our atlases, and locating the Philippines, and Carolines, 
and Ladrones. China can no longer be a recluse ; Corea will 
not again be a hermit nation ; Japan is suddenly a young 
giant, springing up full armed, and bright with the promise 
of the sunrise. But through all this wonderful change there 
runs the discord of human selfishness. We are reminded 
that civilization that is not founded on eternal principles can- 
not stand, and ever there rises a cry for more than armies 
and governors can give. Unless these ambitions and long- 
ings in nations civilized and savage can be met by something 
more than diplomacy and force they will only end in self- 
destruction. 

Why has the religious instinct been given, except that 
like all other appetites there should be an answer from God 
possible ? He who said " Blessed are they that mourn," said 
also,*" Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after right- 
eousness." From Plutarch's day to the present observing 
minds have seen the power and the beauty of the faculty of 
praise to God. But this appetite has been given in order 
that Jesus might have the opportunity to bestow that which 
He brought to earth. The world's need is not government, 
not armies, not diplomacy, but life. We live in the dream 
that a race shall arise that can not only achieve victories, but 
can endure success ; that shall not be intoxicated with its 
own power, but shall see in strength a grand opportunity, and 
in the millions of human beings that come under its influence 
the greatest missionary call of the ages. Wherever we look 
we see a world that has made some progress and stopped, 
that has achieved some little success, and then lost its 
inspiration, and suffered stagnation. If the Anglo-Saxon 
race, and its mother, the Teutonic, cannot raise themselves 
with God's help to this height of privilege, the scepter will 
depart from them, and among the effete races of the East 
will come a stirring of the dry bones ; the breath of God will 
blow upon them, and the true missionary spirit will assert its 
privilege. The world is waiting yet as it waited in Jesus' 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 19 

day ; and while the church disputes over forms and ceremo- 
nies and methods, and its heart grows cold, the wail of Mary 
at the sepulcher goes ever up to God: "They have taken 
away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him." 
The world waits, as it has ever waited, for the living Christ. 
The World's Lost Opportunities. In the story of the 
man who was an householder there is a principle of wider 
interpretation than the Jewish race has suggested; humanity 
has always been treating God's gifts as if they were their 
own, and has slain the Son when He came to claim His 
right. The lord of the vineyard has always been destroying 
the husbandmen and letting out his vineyard to others. To 
state it differently, the world has many times had light 
enough by which to find the life God had in store for it, and 
each time it has been placed under a measure, and its power 
has been lost. The study of philology has shown that at 
least a large part of the human race once dwelt under one 
roof and spoke one language, and the strongest proof of it 
is in the words that sprung from the religious life. God has 
singled out particular races and given them special knowl- 
edge, but it has been lost. Paul's visit to Athens was in her 
decay; Sparta had long before gained the ascendency; forti- 
fications, religion, philosophy, were wrecked at Athens. 
The consecrated visitor was keen to select the most touching 
relic of a great past, and make it the text for the grandest 
address ever delivered. The altar to the unknown god was 
not an incident of their worship, but the poor and lonely 
remains of what had been the origin of their greatness. It 
had come to them from their ancestors, the Pelasgi, who wor- 
shiped the supreme God without temples or images, and 
whose altars flamed from the highest mountain tops. They 
even worshiped Him without a name, suggesting the unpro- 
nounceable name among the Hebrews. Zeus means the 
heavens. When they wished to imply a nearer relation they 
called Him Zeus Pater, almost identically the Saviour's 
expression, "Our Father which art in heaven." Here is the 



20 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

beginning of Greek history, before the Doric and Ionic 
invasions had made confusion of thought, and the develop- 
ment of the commercial spirit had made men selfish. Our 
first vision of the race that was to give the world its best 
philosophy and finest art is of a simple people, kneeling under 
the open sky and worshiping the unseen author of their 
world. They kept their reverence for the unseen, but so 
mingled it with superstition and polytheism that all that was 
left when Paul came was that one altar. Instead of worship 
of God under the open sky there was Delphi, the mother of 
superstition and craven fear. 

No race can be studied until we have some knowledge 
of its religious life. God has ordained that in the starting of 
a new world force there shall be the impulse of a purer wor- 
ship than has been. But it is not alone at the beginning ; 
nations have become and remained great according to the 
religious impulse they have received and preserved, and 
when that has been lost, their decline and fall have begun. 
English history begins at Carnac and Stonehenge. Call 
Druidism heathen if you will, it had much to do with the 
formation of Anglo-Saxon character. The civilizations of the 
Saxon and the Teuton are what they are today because the 
moral impulse with which they started was not lost in doubt 
and scoffing, but followed by a purer and diviner impulse that 
carried forward what had been fairly well begun. Too much 
credit cannot be given to those first missionaries who carried 
the religion of Jesus Christ among the races that had 
become hardy by exposure, and whose first faith in Christi- 
anity was as simple as that of a little child. Gibbon tells us 
that the civilizations of today came out of the forests of 
England and Germany, but they did not emerge until 
Christian missionaries had gone in, and Boniface had not 
only dared to chop down the sacred oak, but had it cut into 
timbers, with which to build a chapel for the worship of Jesus 
Christ. The history of races that have kept their inspira- 
tion shows in startling contrast those that did not. The 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 2 1 

Pelasgi were not the only people of the olden time who had 
a pure worship ; that of the early Persians is almost as clear 
as that of the nations of modern times. In fact, the more 
we study the races of antiquity the more clearly this point 
appears, that Paul was right when he said God had not left 
Himself without a witness. The difficulty has always been 
to lead the people to keep the witness after its divine 
impartation. 

The most startling instance in all history is that which 
confronted Jesus at every step. The law as revealed in the 
Old Testament has in it all the teaching that is necessary 
to make men godlike. Whenever Jesus was appealed to 
for the heart of his teachings He went right to the Law. 
A modern Jew finds all the Sermon on the Mount in the 
Old Testament, and is astonished at the beauty and force it 
possesses when Jesus has spiritualized it. One thing only 
is lacking, and that is the life that the Saviour brought. 
Because of this lack men had allowed the Law to degener- 
ate into a heavy weight, a matter of casuistry that made the 
people moral cowards. As a result of moral disintegration 
a large part of the nation had been deported, and had never 
come back. The rest had suffered deportation, and only 
through the general policy pursued by Cyrus of reinhabit- 
ing desolated lands with their own people did it come to pass 
that the poorest part of Judah returned and rebuilt the wall 
and the temple. The then modern students of the Law had 
added interpretation to interpretation, until a plain man had 
difficulty in worshiping God in spirit and in truth. Hence 
the surprise with which men said, " Never man spake like 
this man." In all human history no greater contrast could 
be found than that between the scribes and the Saviour.. 
The Jewish race had lost the inspiration given them through 
Moses, and like other races had degenerated into a supersti- 
tious formalism. Now we know what the Saviour meant 
when He said, "Ye are the salt of the earth. But if the 
salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted ? " Other 



2 2 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

peoples have had opportunity ; you have life ; but if you lose 
that life there is no further hope either for you or those to 
whom you are sent to impart this life. The fatherhood of 
God has been revealed before, but men have not appre- 
hended it ; you are sent out to carry it as the Son has re- 
vealed it ; you carry the means of salvation ; be careful not 
to lose it. 

The Life Jesus Imparted is a Moral and Spiritual 
Power. Life is more than existence. The sheep are alive ; 
the thief comes to kill ; the Saviour came to keep alive, but 
more than that, to lead them in green pastures and beside 
still waters, that their life may be abundant. Life means 
progress, growth, development. If the eternal life Jesus 
came to give were nothing more than the privilege of eter- 
nal existence we would not crave it. But " This is life 
eternal, that they may know thee, the only living and true 
God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." So of life 
here; under the impulse of the love of Christ life becomes 
worth living. He is the moral and spiritual force that moves 
the world. There is deep significance in the words of the 
late Lord Beaconsfield, when he called the attention of think- 
ing people to the fact that the nations that are leading the 
world in art and science and everything that is worth the 
having, are the nations where Jesus Christ is most earnestly 
preached and most faithfully worshiped. That great Jew had 
his eyes open, and did not hesitate to tell what he saw. There 
has been remarkable preserving and developing power where 
Jesus has been preached until the heart yielded. Something 
has been at work on these races ; others have had equal op- 
portunities ; China discovered several of our most valuable 
.improvements long before we did; with gunpowder she made 
nothing more destructive than fire-crackers ; with the begin- 
ning of the mariner's compass she has the record of sending 
only one small squadron a few miles from sight of land. 
With the secret of movable type she printed no book. The 
difference between China and Germany is the difference 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 23 

between a race that has no personality because it has no 
conception of the real fatherhood of God, and one that has 
a moral purpose, great and abiding. The people who gath- 
ered on the housetops at Worms as Luther went by to his 
great trial, and besought him to be firm, and quoted passages 
of the Word of God to cheer and strengthen him, had life. 
No uncertainty there, no wavering, no clinging to ancestral 
traditions simply because they are old. They were own cous- 
ins to Cromwell's Ironsides, of the same stock and with the 
same spirit. 

This national or racial life is entirely dependent on indi- 
vidual life. Sociological studies have of late somewhat ob- 
scured this ; we are at our old trick of inverting the divine 
order. We forget that when the Saviour had the opportu- 
nity of His life, as the world sees it, He deliberately turned 
away from the multitudes, telling them they were after the 
loaves and fishes, and devoted himself to training the few 
who were willing to give up all for Him. Cromwell had 
caught his method when he declared that he believed that 
a few honest men were better than numbers, and formed his 
army of a thousand who were never defeated, and who in 
many battles saved the day for those who in Cromwell's 
phrase were not so honest. We are in danger of doing in 
religion what we have long done in public charities, of train- 
ing up a great army in the church who are there for the 
loaves and fishes. The part of the church that does the 
work, bears the burden, gives to missions, sends the gospel 
round the world, may all be comprehended in that not very 
large number proportionately who are in the church simply 
and solely for the life it gives. For when the life of Jesus 
takes hold upon a man it quickens all his faculties, clarifies 
his distinctions between right and wrong, stirs him up to do 
for others as he would have others do for him, makes him in 
every sense a new man in Christ Jesus. Christian philos- 
ophers in coming days may have occasion to associate in 
thought the increasing sluggishness in general Christian 



24 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

benevolence in our day with the tendency to try to human- 
ize the church, thereby attracting attention to the outward 
and visible, and losing sight of the value Jesus puts on an 
immortal soul. In attempting to put greater stress on the 
command to love our neighbor as ourself we may forget, as 
some so-called Christians have been glad to do, that it is 
founded wholly on the other and greater, " Thou shalt love 
the Lord thy God." The second commandment never can 
last permanently when it is robbed of its power by belittling 
the first. The disciples whom Jesus trained to love God 
first through Himself went to the ends of the earth for His 
sake, not for the sake of humanity ; there was ever before 
them the fact that the Master was with them and knew 
their work. Paul was a debtor to all the earth because his 
sins had been forgiven through Jesus. 

When the life forces are low, and death seems inevita- 
ble, the skill of the physician and the care of the nurse, no 
matter how well they are given, lose all their power ; they 
are only valuable as aids to the life. The patient lies for 
weeks at the point of death ; the doctors give him up ; the 
pulse is only a slight nutter that will go out in a moment. 
There comes a morning when the family gather about the 
bed, and watch the slow, heavy breathing that does not pen- 
etrate the lungs ; it becomes slower and slower ; it stops ; 
there is no pulse ; the nurse says it is over. A few minutes 
later it is noticed that a faint breathing has commenced 
again; it seems a miracle, but it is a fact. The doctor says 
frankly that medicine has not done it. The breathing grad- 
ually gains in strength ; after a day or two the patient opens 
his eyes and looks faintly upward ; there comes a day when the 
nurse points out a slight appearance of returning flesh where 
the bones have been absolutely bare; it becomes more and 
more noticeable, then a slight use of the hands and arms, then 
of the lower limbs. It is a great day when he first sits up, a 
greater when he takes his first step. He continues to gain 
until every sense has returned in all its power, and the lad is 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 25 

stronger and brighter than he was before. Scientific men 
say it is one of those constitutions that endure in spite of 
death itself. But the secret of it all is life ; the life had 
never left the body ; it conquered disease and death itself, 
and under its power the boy becomes a man. Now is there 
any point in this recovery where we dare to say that we will 
depend no longer on life forces, but on externals ? Jesus 
tells us that in Him is life, and He intends us to understand 
that this life is to have its work even to the end. There will 
never be a day when we can help that convalescent by treat- 
ing a class, and so expecting to build him up. The conser- 
vation of life in the one who has been sick demands all our 
thought. So with the soul that has life through the Saviour; 
the only possibility for it is the love of Christ for him, and 
the inspiration that Jesus has for him, that he may be the 
channel through which the Holy Spirit carries the glad 
tidings to another. Christ treated souls as individuals ; the 
result was the grandest missionary impulse the world has 
ever seen. 

III. And May Have Abundance. The verb here is 
closely associated with the fullness of the promise; "may 
continue to have" would be its full meaning; it is in the 
present subjunctive. It is a continual having, not getting 
nor giving, but having, and because of this having it means 
growing abundance. Not having abundantly, but having 
abundance ; the word that is timidly placed in the margin of 
the Revised Version is the real meaning. The Saviour is 
promising not only abundance of life, but the abundance 
that goes with abundant life. It is a large promise, worthy 
of the Son of God. It is limitless. It is a standing rebuke 
to our willingness to take only salvation at His hands. 

Life for Self Purification. This differentiates Christi- 
anity from other religions. It has the power of self-develop- 
ment and self-purification. It is always better farther on. 
It places an ideal before the eyes today, and when that has 
been achieved or almost reached it has another a step beyond. 



26 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 



A Christian man becomes dissatisfied with his own short- 
comings, and reforms within himself. A monk, trained in an 
Augustinian convent, started the reformation in Germany. 
The beginners in that mighty movement were in the heart 
of the Roman Catholic church, and obtained their education 
there. The Bible had found them in the course of their 
studies, and the Holy Spirit had made use of the same 
weapons He always does, with the result that their eyes were 
opened, and they longed for the purifying of the church. 
However selfish the motives of Henry VIII may have been, 
his reformation was a step in advance, beginning within the 
church, and made the way possible for the Puritan and the 
Pilgrim who followed. The Reformation, that was stayed in 
some parts of the Continent of Europe, has had its way 
among the Anglo-Saxons, working until now, and the end is 
not yet. There is iron in the blood of the Anglo-Saxon, and 
it comes from his belief in God and His providence. No one 
but an Anglo-Saxon would have thought to make the reply 
of Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga, when the British captain 
demanded his authority : " In the name of the great Jehovah 
and the Continental Congress." The English and American 
race has been moving onward in the name of the Great 
Jehovah for centuries, and has only just begun. 

The Gaul and the Briton were one in belief and oppor- 
tunity in the days of the Druids. Their difference has been 
the difference in their writers and preachers. Carlyle men- 
tions as three typical names in English literature, Knox, 
Milton, and Shakespeare. You can almost hear Knox's 
voice yet in old St. Giles, and the unpretentious little piece 
of stone under the wheels of the vehicles in Parliament 
Square, with its quaint " J. K." upon it, brings up a flood of 
memories of him who feared neither man nor devil, but who 
made a queen to tremble, and who voiced and intensified all 
that is strong and strength-giving in Scotch belief and life. 
Milton, whose faith only stood out more clearly as the day- 
light was shut out from his eyes, our own Independent, who 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 27 

saw much in God's providence that others did not, who loved 
the liberty with which Christ has set us free, and even 
averred that "new Presbyter is only old Priest writ large," 
who longed for the greatest growth of the Kingdom of God ; 
Shakespeare, whose real greatness is accounted for by the 
fact that his writings are saturated with Scripture allusions 
and quotations, — these, according to an authority than which 
there is none better, are typical names in English literature. 
They dealt with the first part of the two great command- 
ments, and the people who with them have learned to love 
the Lord their God with all their hearts are the missionary 
people of today. Voltaire took only the second half of the 
commandment, and, with a heart burning - at the thought of 
human oppression, tried to teach that men ought to love one 
another. Paris, that applauded all he wrote, was bathed in 
blood as she tried to make his idea practical. He never led 
her one step nearer God, and so not one step nearer a real 
love for humanity ; her mad cry of Liberty, Equality, and 
Fraternity had no ring of the divine in it. She sang the 
" Marsellaise " and danced the carmagnole, but sent no 
missionary to an oppressed brother. The great thought of 
human brotherhood with God left out, that Voltaire preached, 
is even now showing its hollowness in the festering mass of 
race hatred and official corruption that stains the fair name 
of the republic that we dare to hope may even yet stand 
beside us in the effort to lead the world to Christ. Zola's 
great and bitter cry has gone forth, but it is a cry of despair ; 
he sees only fate and nemesis at work on France, no divine 
Providence, no " God within the shadow, keeping watch above 
his own." His reference to Jesus seems to us impious, as he 
says by comparison that "Jesus was condemned but once." 
Was Carlyle right when he called St. Pierre's " Paul and 
Virginia" the swan song of French literature? No other 
race has ever trained such men as Carlyle named. After all 
allowance has been made for the rugged climate and un- 
toward surroundings of the British Isles, it still remains true 



28 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

that the religion of Jesus Christ has made them what they 
are. That religion will never allow them to stop in their 
great onward sweep toward the civilization that shall per- 
meate the world, until He shall come whose right it is to 
reign. 

We have been illustrating the self-purifying power of 
the love of Christ under the most favorable circumstances. 
How is it where the spark of faith is small, and may easily 
go out ? We shudder at the cruelties of Cortez and Pizarro, 
who called themselves Christian, and yet in many respects 
were not so civilized as the people th,ey conquered. They 
brought a rough gospel to the gentle races of Mexico and 
Peru ; and the conversions of which they boasted were not 
much more than an exchange of idols. Yet in both these 
countries there has been for a number of decades a strug- 
gling toward the light, an anxious looking for something 
better, that presages a true Christian civilization yet to come. 
And the islands of the sea ; how have they been brought to 
our very doors by the fortune of war ! Some one besides the 
authorities at Washington had to do with the selection of the 
quiet man whose guns that May morning changed the map of 
the world. To the Roman Catholic church in the United 
States God is sending a challenge, and all the world waits to 
see her accept it ; here is her opportunity ; her best men are 
as much ashamed of the condition of things in the Philip- 
pines as we are ; she has priests as pure and as consecrated 
as the first missionaries she sent over to this continent, and 
it is in her power to illustrate as she never has yet the self- 
purifying power of Christianity. She is being watched, to 
learn if she sees her opportunity, and if she does not, other 
missionaries will do it for her. She herself is an illustration 
of the fact we are discussing ; her popes are a different race 
from those of a few hundred years ago, and in the last few 
weeks some hot-headed opponents of Romanism have learned 
to their surprise that priests may stand for law and order. 
So the life Jesus gives solves old problems by raising new 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 29 

ones, and the life becomes ever more complex. The prayers 
of our fathers that the doors of China and Japan might be 
opened to the missionaries of Christ have been so answered 
that we tremble at the weight of responsibility they have 
laid upon us. Now we are praying that the people of God 
may see their most magnificent opportunity, and give the 
money, for there is no lack of men, and send this old world 
forward with an impulse she has never had before toward the 
millennium promised by the Master. The burden grows 
heavier as we go forward, as did that of the Saviour, but the 
same power persists to the end, with ever-increasing effect- 
iveness. 

Abundance in All True Progress. A religious motive 
has been under material as well as spiritual gain. This was 
true before Christ came ; it has been doubly true since. 
Phidias made his best reputation in religious sculpture, and 
strange as it may seem to us, he worked under an inspiration 
that moved all Hellas. His Athene Parthenos was something 
more than a work of art ; it meant a religious revival ; it was 
part of a great forward movement, which was helped by 
yEschylus, the firm believer in the religion of his fathers, and 
by the pious Sophocles. Their sentiments were shared by 
Pericles, who, in spite of his philosophy, and of immorality 
tolerated by the religion of those days, publicly and in his 
own house zealously offered sacrifices to the gods, and was 
constant in prayer. If men could be so moved by high and 
holy motives when as yet there was no great personal revela- 
tion of God, what should we expect when the opinion of 
Socrates was verified that if sin was to be eradicated, one of 
the gods must come to earth to attend to it ? The coming of 
Jesus Christ marks the beginning of the world's best growth 
in everything worth having. That wonderful speech of Paul 
on Mars Hill was epoch-making. The sneering audience of 
Epicurean and Stoic philosophers was doomed as the speaker 
crept down from above the cave of the furies, with a man 
following him who should become the bishop of the Christian 



30 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

church in Athens, and seal his devotion with his life. 
Epicurus and Zeno must give way to Plato and Aristotle, 
whose philosophy the religion of Jesus Christ could take and 
irradiate until it should become the basis for the grandest 
thought in modern times. Christianity conquered Greek 
culture ; the conquered, as has so often been the case, in turn 
became the victor, and the thought of personal allegiance to 
Jesus was overshadowed for centuries by the effort for intel- 
lectual grasp of divine truth. The age of creed-making has 
not been as Christian in its spirit as it might have been, but 
the fact is apparent that when the truth as it is in Jesus 
began to take hold on human thought it brought out the 
greatest strength the intellect has ever shown. The world's 
intellectual giants have been developed in the effort to wres- 
tle with the unrevealed. 

Literature has shown the impulse, and that which lives 
has the coming of Christ behind it. Such themes as were 
sung by Dante and Milton would make any writer great. 
Canova said of Pauline Bonaparte that with such models 
journeymen could make statues ; with the thought of human 
sin and misery, and divine love shown in salvation, any 
writer must become eloquent. How thoroughly this has been 
felt is shown in the strength of English literature. One of 
its best illustrations is Ruskin, whose beauties are those of 
that grandest of all Saxon books, the English Bible. His 
mother taught it to him until it became his very life. Read 
any of his writings with this in mind, and one soon learns 
the strength of the writer and the reason for it. If you 
want contrast, try the lectures of the great agnostic who 
recently dropped out of this life, and see how absolutely 
barren human speech can be made by eliminating the gospel. 
The taste of the people is being rapidly cultivated for reading 
that has this foundation. A large part of the fiction of the 
present is founded on the fact that Jesus came, and on the 
incidents of that coming. The Holy Spirit is making even 
the enemies of Jesus to praise Him. When the leading 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 3 1 

dailies of a city begin to publish the Sunday school lessons 
with comments for teachers each week, and many of the 
Sunday editions are printing more each year that tells of 
Christ, we see that every force may be made subservient to 
Him, and we learn the abundance of His power. That 
which is true in literature is still more apparent in art. Art 
before He came made beautiful faces and perfect figures. 
After His coming artists began to try to paint and chisel the 
godlike into the human visage. The paintings in all the 
great galleries that challenge attention of the multitude, 
those that command the highest prices, are those in which 
are the forms of Jesus and His disciples. Artists have 
wrought till human strength gave way in their effort to paint 
the face of Jesus ; none have ever succeeded, and none ever 
will in this life ; He can only be reproduced faintly in the 
countenances of those who love Him, but the artist has been 
glorified in his attempt at the impossible, and the yearning 
of the heart to know and recognize that countenance has 
given the world the richest and best it has had. 

When we come to sociology we at once run into the 
pessimism of men who have not read comparative history, 
or have read it with strong prejudice. The laboring man 
never stood so high in the scale of being as he does now : 
never had so many privileges, never lived so well, never re- 
ceived so good wages ; this is not saying that he receives all 
he ought to have, but that he is nearer to getting it than 
ever before ; and with all this he has never had so great and 
worthy ambition. The Spirit of the Master is at work on 
human minds and hearts. The world has never before seen 
so large a class of manly and able workingmen as the loco- 
motive engineers that brought us to this meeting, and the 
motormen and conductors that take us about the streets. 
Even the bootblack is an artist now, and no ordinary boy 
can take his place. Humanity has been rising from the 
foundation up. With it there has been a notable improve- 
ment in the condition of the poor. At the beginning of the 



32 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

Christian era the population of Rome is estimated to have 
been 2,000,000; of these 10,000 constituted the nobility; 
1,000,000 were slaves, not all of them degraded ; 50,000 
were foreigners ; the remainder constituted the plebs urbana, 
who were absolutely destitute. Come down to the days of 
Queen Elizabeth, and historians say that one-fifth of the 
population of all England were paupers. At the present 
time General Booth, after the most careful research, going 
through London where crime and poverty are massed, when 
he had placed matters at their very worst, can only talk 
about the submerged tenth. If these figures stand for any- 
thing they mean that the Holy Spirit is lifting humanity in 
the name of Christ faster than we realize. Nineteen-twen- 
tieths slaves and paupers in the best city of its time, reduced 
in sixteen Christian centuries to one-fifth of the best nation 
of its time, and that in three centuries more reduced to one- 
tenth in the worst place in that nation. Now we can see 
what Jesus meant when He said that He came that they 
may have abundance. 

This Abundance is to Come by Inspiration. Those who 
work in the name of Jesus have just one power that others 
do not possess ; they have but one ; it is important that they 
recognize the fact. If the church gives herself to acts of 
charity as a business, she wakes suddenly to find that the 
newspapers have taken it up, and can raise more in a day 
than the church can in a year, and gloat over it. If she 
grapples with questions that have to do with human condi- 
tions, she finds herself only a small part of the great num- 
ber that are wrestling with the same, and soon, in their des- 
peration at want of success, they are blaming her for not 
immediately solving the whole vast problem. And so on 
with the great round of practical applications of the spirit 
of love to modern problems. The late Dr. Dale was right 
when he said that the mission of the church ends with being 
inspirational ; but we must not forget that his was an inspi- 
ration that inspired, even to parliament. The church has 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 33 

not yet successfully devoted herself to both inspiration and 
method. One or the other always suffers, and it is usually 
the inspiration. The power Jesus has given His church is 
that of going to the human heart, and so filling it with the 
longing for His presence that it will turn to Him whose it is 
by right, and give Him the opportunity for which He waits 
to make that soul Godlike in power over self, and in love for 
all humanity because of love for Him who died for humanity. 
When a soul is thus illumined and inspired it will find its 
own method. 

Nothing ever moves a man so completely as to learn 
that you are trying to give him spiritual power. He will be 
grateful if you feed him in his hunger and clothe him in his 
poverty ; but soon he will blame you if you do not continue 
to do it. But when you lift his soul out of the mire and let 
the love of Christ fill it, he never ceases to be grateful. 
Only one mortal had any power for good over Alcibiades. 
That gifted and dissolute young man thought the whole 
world came only to flatter and cajole him in order to get 
something from him. He learned after a time that Socrates 
wanted of him only one thing, and that was his immortal 
soul. He listened, became interested, tried to grasp his 
thought, and the time came when with hot tears he admitted 
that a life that Socrates did not approve was not worth liv- 
ing. Men sneered as the handsome young courtier and the 
ugly old philosopher went by, and attributed their friend- 
ship to vile motives, but the confession of the young man 
was deep and sincere. Socrates lacked only one motive to 
have made Alcibiades one of the world's greatest characters. 
That was the one Paul and Silas hurled at their jailer when 
the prison at Philippi was shaken : " Believe on the Lord 
Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." That motive brought 
Dionysius the Areopagite down from Mars Hill, while his 
brother philosophers sneered ; it transformed the brutal 
jailer into a man all love and sympathy. That motive 
turned the world upside down, by the confession of their 






34 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

enemies, wherever the disciples went. That motive has 
been the lever by which humanity has been lifted thus far. 
We live in treacherous times ; the results of Christianity are 
before us ; we see their value ; we are surrounded by the 
seen as never before ; this means that the unseen is not so 
real in our thought as it was once. Mr. Gladstone has well 
pointed out the fact that the meaning of the modern word 
" altruism " is really a perhaps unconscious borrowing of the 
results of Christianity, without realizing the power that has 
produced them. We are in the same danger in our thought 
of missions for the whole world. Oh ! for one hour of that 
terrible reality in the conception of a world lost in sin that 
sent the first modern missionaries on their long voyage to 
their life work, that filled the treasuries and girdled the earth 
with prayer. Our fathers had enough power to pray open 
the long-shut doors of China and Japan. Have we enough 
of the same kind of power to make their people glad their 
doors are open ? We as missionaries are not to enter these 
doors merely in order that the people may have the blessings 
of civilization that we have, but that they may have the in- 
spiration that gave us those blessings, and that then they 
may go to work in the power of Christ's love, and develop 
beyond what has yet been seen. Not the result, but the 
power, is what the world needs ; it asks bread ; we must be 
careful, or we shall give it a stone. The blessings of civil- 
ization without the love of Jesus will prove only a means to 
greater sin and misery. Without the spiritual impulse we 
shall give only our most harmful vices. 

When Raphael died there was an unfinished picture on 
his easel. It represented the Transfiguration ; the Saviour 
and His three disciples on the top of the mountain, at the 
base the dumb demoniac child whom the scribes had brought 
that they might win a triumph over the followers of Jesus. 
The picture was incomplete, but it was Raphael's, and one 
of his best. It was placed beside his body and carried in 
the funeral procession. It was too precious to be allowed 



OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 35 

to go from Rome, and was never placed beside its companion 
picture, the Resurrection of Lazarus, by Sebastiano. It was 
significant ; the great painter had caught the thought of 
the story ; his untimely death had emphasized it. The won- 
dering disciples on the mount had not apprehended the 
purpose of the transfiguration ; they only wanted it to last 
always ; but down in the valley was the demoniac boy. The 
question for them and for us is, can we get enough inspira- 
tion on that mount to cast the devil out of the boy at its 
base, or shall we get only sufficient to make us appear 
ridiculous in the eyes of the enemies of Christ? How often 
the disciples have been able to receive only sufficient to 
make them want to stay always on the height ? But that is 
not the divine plan. We have misunderstood the inspira- 
tion ; we have belittled it ; we thought the divine intent was 
that we should be at peace above this world of woe, when it 
really is that we shall plunge into the life below with the 
story of a life unknown before, with a power that shall put 
to flight the devils that haunt human hearts. Under the 
name of Christian we have given currency to the idea that 
the physical healing of that boy is the great thing to be 
desired ; we spend millions on societies to care for him after 
he has been plucked out of the fire ; we start rescue stations 
to pull him out of the water ; we fail to realize that our 
mission is to cast the devil out of him. There he writhes, 
and there comes to us the patient voice of the Master : 
"This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting." We 
had thought there was some other way ; we had wondered 
that we could not do it. Our transfiguration, like Raphael's, 
is unfinished, and the boy waits, and the devil tears him, 
and casts him into the fire and into the water ; and the 
enemies of the Master sneer at our incapacity. And we are 
intent on staying with Christ on the mountain, so intent 
that none of His wonderful inspiration becomes ours. He 
sighs as He heals him Himself, and we wonderingly ask, 
"Why could not we cast him out?" All we can do is to bring 



36 OPPORTUNITY FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT. 

Him to the boy, or the boy to Him. Shall we ever learn the 
conditions under which that Spirit that dwelt in Him will 
take up his abode with us ? Until we do, our efforts will 
be lame and our longings unsatisfied. We have to learn 
that the power of the Spirit can be ours only when we are 
willing to meet God's conditions. 



A 



